Minor Details
by sortasupersam
Summary: Making love, making mistakes. Making enemies, making up. Making the most of it. Levi/Mikasa.


_We loved with a love that was more than love._

—_Edgar Allan Poe_

* * *

Mikasa didn't want to say that she didn't like chocolate icing. Chocolate cake, sure, she could handle it, but there was something about the artificially cocoa globs of lightweight goop that left Mikasa with three new cavities and an upset stomach. Granted, it wasn't like she paraded this information for her family to know and work around, but still. This cake they had custom baked and tailored to her taste buds would have a good run of sitting on the fridge shelf for a week before ultimately meeting its fate with the bottom of their trash receptacle.

"Birthday candles?" Aside from the genuine expression of thanks she gave, this was the first sentence Mikasa could muster.

"They were fresh out of college-acceptance-letter candles," Eren explained with his snarky grin that he wore almost perpetually.

"I'm just so proud of you," Carla, Mikasa's adoptive mother, placed the cake—disgusting cocoa icing and all—gingerly on the granite counter top. "It's not every day that a child of mine gets into an Ivy League school."

Eren seemed to resent that comment. Eren seemed to resent a lot of stuff. "_I _got in the Military Academy!"

"And it was just last month that _you_ had a congratulatory cake," Carla was still all cheery, but with that motherly shut-up-this-isn't-about-you firmness. Mikasa just thought that Eren got the strawberry frosting on his cake, which washer favorite.

"Thank you again," Mikasa thanked again. "But it really isn't that big of an accomplishment."

"It's more about _graduating _from school," Dr. Jaeger finally said in the midst of this celebration. Calling him by his first name, Grisha, seemed a bit too casual for their relationship, and even referring to him as _father _in her head was out of the question. "Eye on the prize, right Mikasa?"

Mikasa nodded, but without much enthusiasm. "Right."

"How was work?" Carla moved the conversation swiftly along. "And how big of a slice do you want?"

"No thank you," Mikasa shook her head, not making a move to put down her bag or keys, a signal to her family that all she wanted as to continue her route up to her bedroom. "Work was alright. It was a long day and all I think I need is some rest."

"And water," Dr. Jaeger added, already sending Carla to retrieve a bottle already chilled in the door of the fridge. "Hydration is key."

"Thank you," Mikasa accepted the water bottle with a slight bow of the head, a custom she could never truly shake. Her birth mother ingrained the mannerisms of the Oriental deep into Mikasa's head. This was also going on at least five times she said thank you. "Good night."

Before giving Carla, or maybe even Eren, the chance to guilt her into swallowing the chocolatey confectioner's nightmare, she continued one footstep after another toward the hardwood flooring of the staircase. Mikasa felt the sting of Dr. Jaeger's gentle hand on her shoulder as she moved forward.

When Mikasa moved in, the only room left to call her own was the bedroom tucked in the corner of the Jaeger house. It was a fairly decently sized bedroom with well-crafted furniture, but Carla always complained how the window was in the direct line-of-sight of the neighboring home.

Mikasa saw this as a non-issue, since that home had been for sale since before her adoption, and she hung up some curtains anyway.

She saw this as such a non-issue, that she rarely even closed her curtains. It wasn't like someone was watching her.

Taking in her every move.

Absorbing her essence through her window pane.

Observing each one of her private nuances.

Because that would be absurd.

It was a long day at work, and the mixing of the moon and the streetlights flooded into her room. Mikasa had been lazy the day prior, leaving a folded pile of laundry on the foot of her bed, which cast a monstrous shadow on the wall opposite the window. Mikasa decided she could live with being a slob for one extra day, and collapsed on her bed right beside her spring meadow-scented creased shirts.

Suddenly, when her back collided with the memory foam, Mikasa realized she wasn't as tired as she initially thought. The clock on her bedside revealed that it was hardly ten o'clock. She already dismissed herself to bed, so Mikasa did not feel any inclination to rejoin the party downstairs. Instead, Mikasa analyzed the stack of laundry, noticing a peek of the dryer sheet sandwiched between a sports bra and one of her more scandalous pairs of underwear.

She wasn't particularly motivated to actually put away her laundry, but she did find it in herself to reach over and pull that dryer sheet free. It didn't come without a fight, and along with the dryer sheet came something lacy and black and suggestive.

Frustrated, Mikasa got up to toss the dryer sheet in her little wastebasket. Because the thong that came free with the dryer sheet ruined the neatness of the laundry pile, she decided it was best to just suck it up and put away the laundry altogether.

It was in passing haste that, when in opening her undergarment drawer and finding one of her bathing suits idly resting atop everything else, Mikasa decided that she wanted to go for a swim. Nevermind it was nighttime. If anything, that added to the appeal. No need to smother sun lotion all over her—they never seemed to come in a scent that wasn't a toxic coconutty. Her backyard pool was as convenient as they came.

So it was settled. Off came the clothes, in the utter nude, in front of her window. She slipped on the top, a mere piece of aquatic fabric flimsily tied around her ribs, and the matching bottoms, and without bothering with a towel or a book or even her cell phone, she opened the window to her bedroom.

Childhood curiosity allowed for Mikasa to perfect the technique of scaling down to the backyard below her. Her old home with her real parents were made of the same rocky siding, and in a fit of perpetual only-child skull-numbing boredom, Mikasa calloused her fingers and toes enough to handle wedging them in the cracks between the stones. Eren's midnight urges to sneak out, and of course drag Mikasa along, allowed for her to do it many years later. Ascending was the hard part anyway. Just three faithful steps down the side of the house, and Mikasa's toes were digging into the topsoil of Carla's flowerbed.

Unpolished nails peeked out of the chocolatey earth, but Mikasa didn't give it much thought. The night air against her bare skin gave her goosebumps.

The water was warmer that she expected, and after an experimental foot sliced through the still water, Mikasa dove head first into the six-foot abyss. Her stomach scraped against the rough floor, but she liked the feeling. Mikasa could feel the swelling of her lungs against her ribs, desperately rationing what little oxygen was already in there, and she slowly blew out of her nose, the bubbles running up her cheeks and to the surface.

Mikasa opened her eyes, seeing nothing but emptiness, spotted with the blinding intensity of the underwater light fixtures. Her own fingers extended to propel her forward, but with every stroke, her arms refracted, then lengthened, and refracted, then lengthened.

Finally, it was time for air.

With no instinctive rush, Mikasa glided to the surface, hardly making a splash as the night air pricked her body like needles on a pincushion. Her legs felt so warm enveloped in the water, while her shoulders and head fought a war with the cool breeze.

Reclining backward, she floated on her back, toes peeking out of the pool, and she stared up into the navy vastness of the sky. The stars glowed with varying determination, and Mikasa was overwhelmed with her inability to truly _comprehend _the value of the numbers that represented the distance between her place in this pool on this earth, with _that _star, or _that _one, and the numbers that represented the distance between _those_ stars.

And here she was, in a gravitational purgatory. Floating in the water, she was no longer at the true mercy of gravity, but she wasn't making nice with the stars and the sun and Jupiter and all the martians out there that she knew weren't real, but whose existence she could never bring herself to truly refute.

The night was as starry as her eyes. Mikasa could hear her heartbeat in her ears.

That's when she saw the figure in the window.

It wasn't like a ghost, like a misleading shadow tricking the eye. No, that was most definitely a man standing in the second story of the neighboring house, the one she thought had been for sale. Maybe he was a trespasser, even though Mikasa would guess he was way past the prime adolescent rebellious phase—that was saved for a taste more akin to Eren.

She stared straight at that retangular body, watched as a hand lifted a cigarette to a darkened face. The backlight cast from a different room—the hallway maybe, or the bathroom—outlined a crisp and clear body, but left the details a mystery. He was staring down at her half naked body, a perfect perch for the garden variety pervert, but Mikasa didn't seem to mind.

Not _mind_, per se, but clearly not alarmed in any sense.

In fact, she'd be more willing to use the word _curious._

Mikasa shifted her weight back to her feet, bouncing on the pool floor to keep her head above water. And inch by inch, she waded her way to the shallower end of the pool, not stopping until the water was level with her navel. Not once did she try to look away from the man in the window.

Admittedly, though, she was at a gridlock. Mikasa wasn't sure how to proceed forward with this man. She wasn't ready to go her separate way, but at the same time, she wasn't socially inclined in even more conventional settings, so Mikasa wasn't about to start a conversation with a shadowy figure a whole ten feet above her, and in the next yard over. The truest plight of the century, yes, but Mikasa knew this butterfly feeling was something foreign.

The man was making no attempt at interacting, either, and yet he remained in the window. The window was floor-to-ceiling, and she could see his entire body—well-dressed in a suit, although the jacket was missing, and his sleeves were rolled to his elbows. She wished she knew what his face looked like, to see if his eyes were even on her. For all she new, maybe he was fond of the pool noodle that was tossed aside.

When he used the dying embers of his current cigarette to light a fresh one, Mikasa decided that he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, and neither would she. So she walked herself to the wall of the pool, and in one—thankfully—graceful motion, she took a seat on the wall, leaving her shins and feet to marinate in the water.

Now it seemed like a game. Like a who-can-go-longest-without-blinking sort of game, but Mikasa never played with these sort of circumstances before, so suffice to say she was intrigued.

Maybe he moved into that house, and he was her new neighbor. But it was a family-sized house, and if that was the case, where was his wife and children? Surely any sort of life partner would take issue with him spying on the neighbor girl. So maybe he wasn't married. And if he wasn't married, he wouldn't exactly have a whole heard of offspring running around. It made her really question his age. Obviously he had some sort of career, meaning he was old enough to have gotten through at least a bachelor's degree worth of college. Then time would have passed for him to establish a good job and save for the kind of money it took to live in this neighborhood so he had to—

The man was moving.

Well, not _moving_ as in _mobility_, but he was shifting his weight, as if he were losing interest and was debating whether to leave or not.

And call it pathetic, but this was the closest thing to excitement—the good kind—that Mikasa had felt in a while, and even though _desperate_ wasn't the right word, it was basically desperation that made her do what she did.

And in utter retrospect, she maybe would have chosen a better method of keeping his attention. And _better _would be the understatement of the century.

And in that moment, maybe Mikasa did regret what she did, but not enough to stop, and certainly not enough to _not _keep going.

With the deftness that only experience could bring, her thumbs hooked the very same flimsy aquatic fabric tied around her chest, and in a fluidly single motion, her bikini top came off.

She didn't think that she had gone to far.

Then she gingerly licked the tips of both her middle and ring fingers, getting it nice and slick with saliva, and hoping with every fiber in her being that those stranger's eyes were locked with her own, she widened her legs enough to leave nothing to the imagination. Wherein she began to pleasure herself.

Maybe this is when she had gone to far.

* * *

_I have no direction for this fic past chapter one, so let's how bad this will be.  
Also, I have working drafts for my other fics. Nothing is abandoned.  
_


End file.
